Looking for a great source of extra traffic for your web site? Interested in attracting qualified buyers to your product or service? Searching for a cheap (or even free) method of marketing your product or service?
If you're an online business owner, you know that attracting qualified traffic -- people who are already interested in buying your product or service -- is fundamental to your success.
That's why I want to tell you about an increasingly popular way to get that cheap, qualified traffic you're always after. They're called "shopping bots" and they're becoming more valuable all the time.
What Exactly Is a "Shopping Bot" ?
Shopping bots are basically like search engines except that instead of finding information, they are designed to help shoppers find the products or services they are looking for on the Internet.
In much the same way as search engines provide searchers with links to web sites, shopping bot sites list specific product information so shoppers can compare features and prices.
And this means that shopping bots can be an excellent way for your potential customers to find out exactly what you have to offer -- and how to get it.
What Are the Benefits of Registering with a Shopping Bot Site?
Shopping bots are a cheap (or, in some cases, free) way to gain "extra" exposure for your product. In fact, it is often easier and cheaper to rank at the top of competitive categories in the shopping bots than in the search engines.
Most shopping bot sites will display ads to potential customers in an appealing, easy-to-understand format, making these sites popular places for savvy consumers to do their product research.
If your product or service is competitively priced or offers buyers a unique or compelling benefit, and if you have a well- written ad, standing out from your competition will be a piece of cake.
Best of all, though, shopping bots can be a great place for business owners struggling to stand out in competitive markets to capture the eyeballs of qualified potential customers -- without spending more than you can afford for the more popular pay-per-click ads like Overture and Google AdWords.
How Do I Get My Site Registered?
Though one shopping bot site differs slightly from the next, registering your web site and products with most of them is usually pretty easy. Here are a few basic rules you need to follow to get your ad placed on a shopping bot site:
a) Submit your product listings to one of the
top 5 most popular bots.
While there are dozens of shopping bots to choose from, there are
only really 5 or so that get enough traffic to make submission worth
your time. (I'll go over my list of top 5 favorites in just a minute.)
b) Is the site format right for you?
You need to consider whether your products or services are competitively
priced, or if they stand high above the competition.
Some shopping bot sites list products according to price, or give shoppers the ability to modify a search to show pricing in ascending/descending order. Others will list suppliers in priority sequence based on pay-per-position bidding.
Shopping bots that place a strong emphasis on price may not be favored by business owners who rely on a unique selling feature instead of price to attract customers.
So, if your product is better -- but not cheaper -- than the competition's, you'll need to find a shopping bot that's a better fit for you.
c) Determine the cost of placing your ad.
For the majority of shopping bot sites, you will be expected to
pay on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. On average, these costs vary
between 5 cents and $1.25 per click,
depending on the popularity of your product and the category it
appears in.
In many cases, you will also need to make a deposit of between $100 and $200, depending on the product or service you are selling. But don't worry -- these deposits are applied toward your PPC account.
d) Get your "product feed" ready to
go.
Your "product feed" is the information you submit to a
shopping bot about the product you want advertised. This may include
a description of your product, pricing, the category you want it
to appear in, your web site URL, and product availability.
For example, a typical product feed looks like this:
- URL: www.fitnessnyou.com/book14.html
- Product Name: Shake It Up!
- Description: Meal Replacement Drink
- Category: Health & Nutrition
- Price: $40/ case of 12
- Availability: In Stock
How you submit your product feed to a shopping
bot site will vary depending on the guidelines of the site.
Some sites make it easy to submit your feed through their online
forms or downloadable software; other sites make it a bit of chore
to submit your feed, requiring you to upload information through
an FTP (file transfer protocol) client.
Whatever the type of product feed a site uses, beware of third-party
companies or web sites that want to take your hard-earned money
to create product feeds for you.
Creating your own product feed is not a difficult process to learn,
and can save you a lot of money in the end.
e) Register your product feed.
Once you have decided which shopping bot site to use and have created
your product feed, registering should take a matter of minutes.
The shopping bot site administrators will review your information
for approval.
Be aware that the approval process can take anywhere from a few
days to a couple of weeks.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Larger shopping bot sites share their listings with affiliated sites. So, for example, registering with a shopping bot site like Shopping.com, which is affiliated with DealTime.com and Epinions.com, will get you listed with the affiliated sites as well at no extra cost!
Once My Product Is Listed, How Do I Get Noticed?
The best way to get your product noticed is to ensure that your ad includes clear, compelling benefits.
This can make the difference between having prospective customers find you with ease or letting your ad get lost or pushed down in the search results.
Try to avoid using obscure abbreviations or product codes in your ad. For example, would you be more inclined to click on an ad that says:
"Tel. blk. crdlss. 21KF4900-A"
... or an ad that reads:
"900 Mhz Black Cordless Telephone"
You'd pick the second ad, right? That's because it clearly states
what the offer is. Shoppers will be deterred by an obscure ad, so
make sure your ad is clear, compelling, and reader-friendly.
Where Should I Start? Which Bots Are Best?
We spent some time checking out dozens of the shopping bots on the 'Net. A number of them are good, but not all of them are worth submitting your ads to. Here are our five favorites:
#1 ON OUR LIST:
BizRate (www.bizrate.com)
BizRate requires a $100 deposit from its merchants, but offers low minimum bidding rates, starting at just 10 cents per click and moving up to 30 cents per click.
Products feeds submitted to BizRate may take 7 to 14 days to be listed, so merchants will need to make sure they aren't pressed for time when advertising their goods.
Merchants with product feeds already submitted to Yahoo! Stores can submit the same feed format to BizRate.
BizRate currently ranks 272 in Alexa (www.alexa.com), which means that the site gets a huge amount of traffic.
#2 ON OUR LIST:
PriceGrabber (www.pricegrabber.com)
PriceGrabber offers many of the same features as BizRate, with one major difference: Merchants without a web site can use PriceGrabber's "Store Builder" option to post their product or service.
There are no up-front costs for this service as it is commission based. Merchants are charged $1.00 on each sale under $15, and 7.5% for each sale over $15. These virtual storefronts are also covered by limited fraud protection of up to $500 with a $15 deductible.
If you want your logo displayed in the search results, you'll be charged an additional fee of $500 or 2.5% of your monthly transactions, whichever amount is greater.
The current Alexa ranking for PriceGrabber is a strong 380.
#3 ON OUR LIST:
Shopping.com (www.shopping.com)
This service works especially well for merchants who don't want to spend time coming up with catchy product descriptions for their product feed, as Shopping.com displays a universal description of commonly searched items at the top of a search page, with ads listed below.
Of course, this may be a disadvantage if you rely on a unique selling proposition (like high quality, or ease of use) as opposed to a competitive price.
Shopping.com offers a flexible bid-management system. For example, if one merchant bids 40 cents for placement and another bids 55 cents, Shopping.com will adjust the higher bid down to 41 cents.
To set up an account with Shopping.com, you will need to put down a minimum deposit of $200 before submitting your product feeds.
Shopping.com currently places at 594 in the Alexa rankings.
#4 ON OUR LIST:
Yahoo! Shopping (www.shopping.yahoo.com)
One of the attractive features of listing with Yahoo! Shopping is that your search results will also appear in other Yahoo! Search engines (such as Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Guides).
Yahoo! Shopping operates on a PPC platform. Costs for PPC listings start at 19 cents (for categories like clothing and general household items) and go up to $1.25 (for categories like flowers and jewelry).
The Yahoo! Shopping search results are listed by item type, but not necessarily by manufacturer or model number. This style of listing can be advantageous to you if your unique selling proposition is more attractive to potential customers than the price of your product or service.
The Alexa ranking for Yahoo! Shopping is 1, which is a bit misleading because www.shopping.yahoo.com is a link through Yahoo!'s main web page.
#5 ON OUR LIST:
Froogle Beta (www.froogle.com)
Google's new free beta shopping bot ("beta" meaning "almost finished, but not quite perfect!") is online and ready for you to use. The "free" aspect of Froogle is an especially attractive element of the beta testing and should not be overlooked.
In fact, it is rumored that Froogle will continue to be free even after the beta testing stages, adding to its appeal. Froogle will be relying on sponsored ads (found at the right- hand side of their web pages) to keep the shopping bot going.
Froogle also offers two convenient ways to submit product feeds:
1) By filling out their online form
2) By making use of their Froogle Feeder software, which can be
downloaded on a 30-day trial basis
Froogle still needs to work out a few bugs before
it can provide shoppers with accurate search results, but it ranks
in our top 5 list because it costs nothing for you to list your
products, and does attract quite a bit of traffic.
Although Froogle receives a whopping third position the Alexa rankings, this can be largely attributed to the enormous amount of traffic coming through Google.com.
A FEW MORE BOTS:
We also found some shopping bot sites that had definite perks to them, but didn't make it into our top 5, including:
- MySimon (www.mysimon.com)
- NexTag (www.nextag.com)
- PriceSCAN (www.pricescan.com)
- StreetPrices (www.streetprices.com)
Final Thoughts
Using shopping bots is definitely a great way to beef up your web site traffic, bringing you qualified (i.e., interested) shoppers without costing you a lot of money.
The most important thing to remember is that not every shopping bot site works in the same way. Choosing the one that suits your product or service will be crucial to the success of your ad.
Used properly, shopping bots can be a great addition to your online ad campaigns and can nicely complement your other marketing efforts.